So, when I wake up I find you here, my life.
I had forgotten the fellow who marveled
over the coins in his pocket and the very shelter
cluttered with his glowing dross,
the investigation called manhood
into the missing synapse of his solitary joy,
the eloquent shelves and the delicacy with which we
dance through them after we’ve given you over too,
the two of us swallowed by a guitar string
coiled in a shotgun that we spy
glancing off an oil prism.

(Funny how liquor has been replaced by tea
and people have become a second craving
after this work clearing rheum and salt
from the day’s whorls…)

Now the real play begins
with children at last
and dogs who are fed at every hour
while a girl stranded in the woods,
naked and extraordinary and married
to the sound of a branch stooping to pee snowflakes
rustles her jeans for a match
to discover what she heard,
and the splayed nerves of her mother
across the meadow appear as iridescent herbs.
I come up out of the riverbed
and tell her to go home.